Market Settles Down

10/14/2008 12:05 PM Eastern

By: Mike Farrell

After a volatile past few weeks, Wall Street has a relatively quiet session Tuesday, with the Dow Jones industrial average finishing down 76.62 points to 9,310.99 and cable stocks remaining relatively stable.

The day kicked off with a big gain—the Dow was up more than 400 points in early trading on news that the U.S. Government would take equity stakes in some banks—but settled into negative territory after investors began to bail out of some technology stocks.

Cable stocks—which enjoyed big gains on Monday when the market surged more than 900 points—held their own, with Cablevision Systems moving up as high as $2.27 per share on Tuesday before closing at $18.76 each, up 34 cents (1.9%) per share. Time Warner Cable finished the day at $22.10 each, up 16 cents per share or 1%; followed by Mediacom Communications, up 5 cents to $4.52 per share. The rest of the sector declined slightly, with Comcast down 33 cents each to $16.64 per share and Charter Communications down 8 cents each to 39 cents per share.

Satellite stocks declined as well—Dish Network was down 60 cents each (3.6%) to $15.90 each and DirecTV Group fell $1.07 per share (4.6%) to $22.13 each.

On the programming side, News Corp. fell 14 cents each to $10.04 per share; Time Warner Inc. rose 9 cents each to $10.49 per share; and Viacom was down 76 cents (3.6%) to $20.30 each.